Wings Over Scotland

Scotland’s biggest cultural problem famously used to be with its alpha males: hard-working, hard-drinking men, often sexist and openly sectarian, with an easy propensity for violence. (The archetype cut right across every social class, from shipyard workers to high-ranking police officers and everywhere between and beyond.)

But times change, and thankfully those characters are now almost entirely a thing of the past. Less happily, though, they’ve simply been replaced by a breed that’s every bit as unpleasant, just in slightly different ways. Readers, meet the Beta Bullies.

Not literally, obviously. Nobody wants that.

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Slacky The Holiday Boy is off for the next THREE weeks, gallivanting around the globe on the clearly excessive wages we’re paying him. We hope he does actually come back, because his home city is becoming a poisonously hostile place for the creative.

Around 300 years ago, Edinburgh was the birthplace and residence of the Scottish Enlightenment, a remarkable period of intellectual and scientific accomplishment built around “the importance of human reason combined with a rejection of any authority that could not be justified by reason”, and which led to the city being famously dubbed “the Athens of the North”.

But those days are past now.

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Just for a change, let’s have a Friday-night competition!

Sharp-eyed readers will have noticed that former First Minister Alex Salmond is staging a show in the Spiegeltent at the Edinburgh Fringe next month, from 4-13 August.

You may even have seen a bit of online criticism from certain po-faced pseudonats about the fact that Salmond is sharing a platform with – gasp! – a Yoon, in the shape of the “last of the traditional Tories”, David Davis MP.

Almost like a debate or something.

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It is our solemn duty to inform readers that deranged, shovel-handed Scottish Greens member and known associate of rapists and paedophiles Scott “Heather” Herbert has taken the hump at a Wings article from yesterday in which he was satirically featured.

He filed a malicious false copyright claim with YouTube which resulted in a silent video clip from the article showcasing his comically gigantic man-hands being scheduled for deletion, despite Herbert owning no copyright in the video (it’s the property of TalkTV, who have raised no objections to it) and having no legal standing to file any complaint.

But YouTube’s abysmal automated structures operate on the basis that all complaints are intrinsically valid, and allow absolutely no way for Wings to appeal this decision.

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Inspired by this tweet:

We thought we’d try the idea out.

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Just over a year ago, Shona Robison – then the Cabinet Secretary For Social Justice, now the Deputy First Minister – told the Scottish Parliament this:

There now follow some quotes from the media regarding the case of Andrew Miller, aka Amy George, who yesterday admitted the kidnap and repeated sexual abuse of an 11-year-old girl at his home in Galashiels earlier this year.

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In June of last year, I started work at Transport Scotland. It wasn’t the best job I’ve ever had. It was pretty much an entry-level post and it was only a temp gig through an agency, but after spending almost six years out of the workforce following a bout with cancer, two frozen shoulders, and chronic knee and hip pain, it was a huge relief just to be earning my keep again.

Of course, June is Pride Month, and Saltire (the Scottish Government’s intranet) was full of news and blogs about “LGBTI+” issues.

Also on the Saltire front page was a prominent invitation to two training sessions to understand the issues facing these groups: “LGBT+ Awareness 101” and “Trans 101”.

These were both run by the LGBTI+ Network, one of several “affinity networks” for civil servants belonging to different groups. With the GRR Bill on the horizon, and having heard stories about how difficult it had been for gender critical groups to get a hearing from the Government in relation to it, I was very curious to hear what this training involved, and I signed up to attend via Teams.

The first session was “LGBT+ Awareness 101”. This session was fairly inoffensive. The content regarding gay people was about what you would expect, and the T+ stuff was clearly biased, but not terrible.

However, the tone of the event suggested quite strongly that you weren’t meant to disagree with anything that was said. Towards the end, when questions were invited, I typed my question into the chat:

“How does the Scottish Government handle conflicts between TERFs and trans people?”

And there my troubles began.

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This is the SNP members’ website tonight.

Looks like anything goes, folks.

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Let’s take a moment off, folks. In our latest Panelbase poll, we also threw in a question just for fun, with genuinely no agenda at all, simply because we were curious to know what the answer was. Here it is:

Some of the detail, though, might intrigue you.

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On January 22nd the violent, abusive transgender activist Jack Douglas, who now uses the name Beth and the Twitter username “pickle_bee” (slang for “somebody who likes dick”), threatened that feminist campaigner Kellie-Jay Keen’s imminent “Standing For Women” event in Glasgow was going to be disrupted by the “furry” community, who happen to be hosting a gathering at the Crowne Plaza that same weekend.

The intimidatory protest was also publicised by SNP MSP Christina McKelvie, who led the standing ovation the Scottish Parliament gave Beth and his creepy friends the day it passed the Gender Recognition Reform bill.

“Why? What possible grudge could furries have against women?”, a friend giggled, as I related this news to her. But to answer that we have to know who these people are.

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It’s been hard to avoid the puffy, perpetually-smirking face of Edinburgh transactivist Beth Douglas, the co-convener of the Rainbow Greens, recently. He’s been all over the media, from Glasgow Live and Edinburgh Live to The National (print and podcast) to Penis News to various national TV bulletins, and interviewed by Owen Jones.

Last week he was prominent in a protest outside Queen Elizabeth House against the UK government’s S35 intervention over the Gender Recognition Reform Bill. He spoke alongside MSPs including Patrick Harvie, Karen Adam, Ross Greer, Paul Sweeney and Alex Cole-Hamilton, who lavished fulsome and effusive praise on him, going so far as to say that it was for Douglas personally that MSPs had pushed the bill through.

But Douglas wasn’t always called Beth.

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In May 2016, this site published one of the most unfortunately prescient articles in its history. It didn’t actually use the words “woke” or “cancelled”, which weren’t yet in common parlance, but its purpose was very much to warn of the puritan, censorious, hyper-intolerant and catastrophically destructive culture they came to embody.

At the time Nicola Sturgeon had only been First Minister for a year and a half and there were few signs that she was that movement’s commander – or, those inclined to a more charitable outlook than us might posit, its prisoner. It would be two more years before she detonated the bomb that really shattered the unity of the Yes movement when she attempted to fit up Alex Salmond over fake allegations of sexual assaults.

But last night and this morning I was struck by an unexpected pang of pity for the fanatical, fundamentalist Twitler Youth rainbow stormtroopers who make up Sturgeon’s ideological frontline. Sympathy for the little devils, you might say.

And since it’s a somewhat rare feeling, it seemed worth a little exploration.

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